Saving Lives With Free to Choose Medicine (Guest: Ed Hudgins)

Ed Hudgins, research director at The Heartland Institute, joins the show to explain how reforming health care through Free to Choose Medicine will save lives, lower costs, and increase competition in the marketplace.

Free to Choose Medicineis a concept developed by Bartley Madden to address the inordinately time-consuming and expensive FDA process for drug approval. On average, it takes 12 years and billions of dollars to bring a single drug to market. People are literally dying while waiting for experimental treatments that could save their lives, all while the cost of health care continues to rise. Free to Choose Medicine proposes a parallel approval track that breaks off from the FDA drug approval process after drugs clear Phase 1 safety trials and one Phase 2 efficacy trial. At this point, manufacturers can chose to offer their drug through the Free to Choose Medicine parallel track.

Hudgins has been studying Free to Choose Medicine’s implementation in Japan and has written several papers on the subject. He joins the Health Care News podcast to discuss his findings and explain why Free to Choose Medicine is the answer for bringing choice back to patients while lowering costs.